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Download by: [The University Of Melbourne Libraries] Date: 19 March 2017, At: 18:23
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media
ISSN: 0883-8151 (Print) 1550-6878 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hbem20
Social Media in the Funeral Industry: On the
Digitization of Grief
Bjorn Nansen, Tamara Kohn, Michael Arnold, Luke van Ryn & Martin Gibbs
To cite this article: Bjorn Nansen, Tamara Kohn, Michael Arnold, Luke van Ryn & Martin Gibbs
(2017) Social Media in the Funeral Industry: On the Digitization of Grief, Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media, 61:1, 73-89, DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2016.1273925
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2016.1273925
Published online: 07 Mar 2017.
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NETWORKED EMOTIONS
Social Media in the Funeral Industry: On the
Digitization of Grief
Bjorn Nansen, Tamara Kohn, Michael Arnold, Luke van Ryn,
and Martin Gibbs
This article explores how innovations in the funeral industry borrow from the
technological affordances, commercial logics, cultural norms, and affective
registers of social media platforms. Based on ethnographic research of funeral
industry conventions, we analyze examples of funeral planning tools, funeral
service mediation, and digital memorialization products. We consider how
these products aim to capture forms of data, affect, and value as part of the
funeral industry’s efforts to shore up their historically intermediary relevance in
the face of potential “disruption”from technological innovation, and threats of
marginalization posed by shifting norms of networked grieving and commem-
oration in digital culture
Social networking sites are increasingly incorporating features to enable the
bereaved to commemorate their dead and share their emotions associated with
loss. While much research to date has focused on social media in the context of
grieving affects and practices, in this article we extend this work to explore how the
funeral industry is adopting and adapting the technological affordances, cultural
Bjorn Nansen (Ph.D., The University of Melbourne) is a lecturer in Media and Communications at the
University of Melbourne. His research interests include home media, children’s media, interface studies, and
digital commemoration.
Tamara Kohn (D.Phil., University of Oxford) is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of
Melbourne. Her research interests include identity and belonging, sensory anthropology, death and com-
memoration, research methods and ethics.
Michael Arnold (Ph.D., Deakin University) is an associate professor and chair of History and Philosophy of
Science at the University of Melbourne. His research interests are at the intersection of technology and daily life.
Luke van Ryn is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne. His research interests are food and
media studies, sustainability and the pragmatic sociology of critique.
Martin Gibbs (Ph.D., The University of Melbourne) is a professor of Human- Computer Interaction at the
University of Melbourne. His research interests lie at the intersection of science technology studies and
human computer interaction with an ongoing interest in Game Studies.
© 2017 Broadcast Education Association Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 61(1), 2017, pp. 73–89
DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2016.1273925 ISSN: 0883-8151 print/1550-6878 online
73
norms, and affective registers of social media to remediate “traditional”sites, rituals,
and relations of grieving.
This analysis is drawn from our ongoing ethnographic work investigating the
digital mediation and transformation of the funeral industry. The research has
involved participant observation at funeral industry conventions held in Australia,
the United States and the UK between 2014–2016, key informant interviews with
representatives of the funeral industry and funeral technology start-ups in those
countries, participant observation at crematoriums and funerals in the UK and
Australia, as well as analysis of trade publications and their coverage of digitally
mediated funeral sites and materials (e.g., Connecting Directors magazine; the
National Funeral Directors Association Innovation Awards).
In this article we discuss several digital funeral products, including: an “end of life
planning tool”(DeadSocial), which provides DIY resources for navigating death,
bereavement, and commemoration online; a remote-controlled Skype-enabled
robot that enables funeral attendance and participation at a distance (“CARL,”
Orbis Robotics); and commercial memorial Web sites that incorporate social
media aesthetics and features such as “social buttons”to share grief
(HeavenAddress; funeralOne). We explore how these innovations draw on the
culture, technology, and commerce of social media (Benkler, 2006; Gerlitz &
Helmond, 2013; van Dijck, 2013), by: (i) translating the ethic of participatory digital
culture to the emotional labor of planning for death; (ii) enabling mediated presence
to remotely participate in funeral services; (iii) appropriating interfaces used to
express emotion on social media sites and repurposing them for the context of
grief. We argue that these innovations demonstrate the funeral industry’s efforts to
remain relevant and viable as commemorative practices become increasingly verna-
cular, individualized and digitized.
Background: Social Media Remembers the Dead
Digitally networked forms of commemoration emerged as the World Wide Web
made the Internet more accessible and integral to people’s day-to-day communica-
tive practices. Defined firstly by static memorial Web pages, these 1990s bricolage
Web practices have largely disappeared, replaced by professionally managed mem-
orial Web sites and the increasingly popular practice of memorializing existing social
media profiles on commercial platforms, most notably Facebook. This embedding of
commemorative practices within mediated spaces that are ostensibly “living”and
“social”has produced new customs and rituals of grieving, as well as new concerns
and anxieties around commemorating the dead.
In western societies the medicalization and institutionalization of death and the
dead has shifted its cultural positioning through the post-industrial era (Earle,
Komaromy, & Bartholomew, 2009). Bodies that were routinely laid out for final
visitation in the family home in the United Kingdom and in the United States for
example, are now laid out in funeral homes. Deaths that occurred in domestic
74 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/March 2017
settings now occur in institutional settings (Laderman, 2003). This is not to say that
death and the dead have been removed from daily life; the mediation of death
through popular culture ensures that it is present on a daily basis. The use of social
media to commemorate and memorialize the dead continues this cultural move to
mediate death and the dead, and reposition the emotional experience within the
flow of daily life (Hutchings, 2012).
The increasingly popular use of social media sites for commemoration raises a
number of issues around the networked expression of grief at an interpersonal level,
but also at a broader level of policy and governance. Problems of management are
particularly acute for large social media platforms such as Facebook, whose user
base includes one sixth of humanity. Facebook’s design and management teams
have a huge ongoing task to create, maintain, and adapt software controls to deal
with an enormous and ever-growing “dead”population among a wider social net-
work of living “friends.”The site was initially set up, after all, as a place for young
people to meet and socialize, not as a place for memorialization and grieving.
Facebook’s policy on how to manage the profiles of the dead has shifted over time
through both planned development of the service and in response to particular
incidents (Chan, 2009). For a long time the only options were to simply leave the
profile as it was when the person was alive, or have the account deleted, which
required a family member to provide legal documentation such as a death certificate.
A variety of motivations have been expressed for not deleting the profile of a dead
loved one. In some cases the profile is retained as a reminder of the deceased, to be
left unaltered, like clothes might be left in the wardrobe. In other cases, friends and
family would continue to post to the site, often using the site to pay tributes to the
deceased, to emote, and to express condolences to others.
With the realization that they must deal with the dead as well as the living, the
designers of social networks have factored the mortality of their users into the archi-
tecture of their platforms, amending and updating policies and affordances to accom-
modate shifting demographics and demands. Facebook’spolicy(“Memorialized
Accounts,”2015) now allows the next of kin to “memorialize”the profile. This adds
the word “Remembering”before the deceased’s name on the profile, deactivates
automated links to and from the profile, and permits existing friends to continue to
post in accordance with the deceased’s privacy settings. Memorialized Facebook
accounts cannot make new connections, and the dead person’s social circle is closed,
but they remain an active node in the social network. Critics argue that the “data-
bodies”of the memorialized dead are perfectly preserved in this option, allowing
Facebook to continue extracting value from data-mining interactions with and through
memorialized profiles as part of the networked connections, or social graph, of
Facebook and its commercial model (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013; Karppi, 2013).
Facebook also has enabled profile owners to nominate a “Legacy Contact”who would
assume responsibility for the profile in case of the owner’sdeath(“Memorialized
Accounts,”2015). Alternatively, people can set up a Facebook memorial page—not a
“profile,”but a “page,”or “group”—that is open to the public. The memorial page is rather
different in its construction and tone: it is far less personal and often established for
Nansen et al./SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY 75
celebrities, or to commemorate tragic deaths captured by the media (Kohn, Gibbs, Arnold,
&Nansen,2012). Clearly, the affordances built into memorial profiles, memorial pages
and the like, steer users of social media towards particular modes of expression and social
participation (Gillespie, 2014; van Dijck, 2013). Yet users of social media platforms have
over time developed their own forms of posting and have thereby shaped the “platform
vernacular”of online memorialization (Gibbs, Meese, Arnold, Nansen, & Carter, 2015,
p. 257). For example, grieving practices on social media often involve vernacular forms of
expression such as directly addressing the deceased with the second person pronoun
“you”(Brubaker & Hayes, 2011; Giaxoglou 2014). The tone of these forms of direct
expression is at one level intensely personal and even private, often about experiences
only shared by those two people. At another level though, there is a public witnessing of
this interaction, which is by default visible to the deceased’s friends. Vernacular expres-
sions of emotion also include the particular informalities that are communicative currency
on particular sites (e.g., Williams & Merten, 2009). For example, spelling will often not
conform to standard English, swearing may be permitted, sub-cultural slang might be
used, memes familiar to a sub-group will be referred to, and so on (for examples see
Nansen, Arnold, Gibbs, Kohn, & Meese, 2016).
Memorialized profiles continue to be appended and modified through the colla-
borative expressions, actions, and interactions of the social networks they remain
embedded within (Nansen et al., 2015). As a result, the dead are also open to different
networked publics—and to emotional conflict as much as collaboration—with
researchers suggesting a need for posthumous profile and impression management
(Marwick & Ellison, 2012), or a stewardship function in the management of the
deceased online (Brubaker & Callison-Burch, 2016). Such preservation practices
situate the deceased within social media’s normative reference to connection
(Burgess, 2015; Light & Cassidy, 2014), which is bound up with commercial agendas,
with social imperatives to connect and network, and with personal and culturally
variable expressions of grieving. The incorporation of memorialization into social
media spaces has clearly influenced practices and norms of commemoration, a
space historically defined, organized, and managed in the developed world by the
funeral industry, which we turn to now in the remainder of this article.
Social Media and the Funeral Industry
Just as social media platforms have adapted to accommodate the dead and
practices of bereavement in their networks, the funeral industry is adopting and
adapting social media as a response both to public demands and to the growing
understanding of how new technologies can be used to support funeral planning,
family grieving, and remembrance of the dead. The range of devices and services
offered within the funeral industry is diverse and growing, and includes technologies
such as memorials that link headstones to Web sites via barcodes and mobile
devices, funerals that deploy Web casting, 3D printing to produce special commem-
orative urns, and cemetery management systems that use drone mapping or virtual
76 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/March 2017
reality tours. These digital commercial products intersect with “traditional”funeral
providers in a number of interesting ways. They have to navigate the gatekeeper role
of the funeral director, historical tensions within the industry around the commodi-
fication of death-related services, and a longstanding distrust of the scope of com-
mercial activity surrounding a death (Sanders, 2009,2012).
Our description in this article of “the”funeral industry is not intended to homo-
genize the work of funeral professionals across different contexts. In the UK, the
United States, and Australia for example, the funeral industry is comprised both of
family companies that have been servicing relatively small, tight-knit communities
for generations, and of multinational companies such as Service Corporation
International and Invocare, which are expanding in this field, and eroding national
and community specificity. In the UK, the United States and Australia, practices vary
widely according to sensitivities that may be religious, age-based, ethnic, environ-
mental, aesthetic, and so on. Cremation, for example, meets with markedly different
responses across the UK, Australia, and the United States. In the United States, where
cremation without a funeral service has been used by the funeral industry as a “loss
leader,”it is widely regarded by funeral providers as a “second best”option (at least
within the industry), whereas in the UK and Australia cremation combined with a full
service funeral is accepted as a perfectly appropriate first choice. Nor should we
neglect the diversities illuminated by research in other developed countries such as
Japan (Suzuki, 2000) and France (Trompette, 2013), and of course diversity across
the developing world, which is still more marked. Indeed, the increasing but uneven
use of social media in the context of death is a direct reflection of this diversity.
The examples we discuss below were encountered at industry conventions, in
trade publications, and during our ethnographic research. The interdisciplinary
research team bring together backgrounds in media studies, anthropology, philoso-
phy of technology, and human-computer interaction studies to research how digital
media in the funeral industry is becoming “embedded, embodied, and everyday”
(Hine, 2015), and to analyze these products through a techno-cultural and socio-
economic lens developed in critical platform and interface studies (Gillespie, 2010;
van Dijck, 2013). We conducted field visits to four large funeral industry gatherings
in Australia, the UK, and the United States. in 2014, 2015, and 2016. We talked with
dozens of professionals, including funeral directors, funeral home and cemetery
owners, arrangement consultants (i.e., salespeople), funeral celebrants, cremation
workers, owners of death industry start-ups, and other death industry entrepreneurs.
We sought out industry people who seemed to have interesting services and pro-
ducts on offer, and pre-arranged interviews. We met many others by happenstance
as we “hung out”and chatted with people at industry conventions, seminars, and
social gatherings. We also conducted more formal semi-structured qualitative inter-
views with our industry informants, in both face-to-face settings and over Skype. We
listened to their formal and informal presentations, and conversed with front-line
workers, industry leaders, and educators. Informal discussions were written up for
analysis as soon as practicable after the event, and more formal discussions were
recorded for full transcription and analysis.
Nansen et al./SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY 77
Our place at these gatherings was privileged in that we were researchers from an
Australian university with an interest in learning about the industry. As outsiders we
were unencumbered by the competition around sale and purchase, so our interlo-
cutors could relax somewhat in our company. They appeared pleased by our interest
in their work and in the significance of their industry.
The funeral industry conventions are spaces for displaying and promoting innova-
tion in the death industry; they showcase services and products as their vendors
imagine them, but they also provide a space of friction where “tradition”and
“innovation”rub up against each other. Digital technologies displayed at these
conventions are typically part of enterprise (business-to-business) services directed
at funeral homes or directors. Funeral directors and funeral homes are also the first
point of contact for members of the public seeking to find and purchase items for
commemoration, and play a critical gatekeeper function. Therefore, in order to
succeed with either enterprise services or services to the public, start-ups and
entrepreneurs need to work through the funeral director or home, each of which
has historically been resistant to change. At the same time they need to convince the
gatekeeper that the industry should change—at least to the extent of accepting the
entrepreneur’s new product. In relation to innovation, funeral directors, homes, and
entrepreneurs also need to address the public relations difficulties inherent in profit-
ing from death, and the broader industry’s struggles to maintain a balance between
“genuine concern”and commercial opportunism (Emke, 2007).
The funeral industry has long had to deal with problems balancing its interests in
caring for families and its commercial interests. Sanders (2012) has written about
how the funeral industry through the 20
th
century developed a moral discourse
around care. As part of this enterprise, people within the industry positioned them-
selves as moral entrepreneurs who were there to preserve the key social good
associated with providing personal service. Sanders’research hones in on consump-
tion more generally (2009), to show how the modern funeral industry in America has
responded to (and encouraged) personal service through providing for expressions of
individualism. New technologies play a key role in this process. By adopting tech-
nological innovation within their suite of products and services, funeral directors are
able to demonstrate personal care by enabling consumers to engage in this increas-
ing co-production and personalization of funerals (Sanders, 2012, p. 266).
While for the time being digital entrepreneurs need pay due deference to the
commercial and cultural intermediation of funeral directors, there is a sense at these
events that the director’s historically powerful economic and cultural intermediary
function is under threat from the inevitability of “digital disruption.”For example, this
is expressed in presentations such as: “Adapt or die: Technology trends disrupting
consumer behavior”from the President and Founder of funeralOne—a digital service
company offering Web site design, funeral Web casting, memorial Web site and
funeral tribute video software—at the 2016 International Cemetery, Cremation and
Funeral Association (ICCFA) convention. The adoption of new technologies can then
also be seen as a reaction to the “disruptive”potentials of the Internet, in which the
circulation of information, the emergence of new products and services, and the
78 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/March 2017
formation of new social relationships around death, commemoration, and grief are
able to circumvent the more traditional gate-keeping function of the funeral industry.
These discourses are significantly shaped by organizations like funeralOne, who are
best placed to benefit from digital adoption in the industry.
While the industry and the Internet continue to operate in parallel with one
another in terms of the distinct kinds of services they offer for dying, death, and
memorialization, they are also becoming entangled in novel ways. In particular, and
as we argue in this article, the aesthetics, affects, and operations of digital media
intersect with the funeral industry at different points in grieving and memorialization
processes, but also in terms of the degree to which they are contested, adopted,or
adapted within the funeral industry.
Contesting the Industry’s Gatekeeper Role
In Australia, the UK, and the United States, the idea of “shopping around”for the
right product and the best deal is not at all novel, but shopping around for a funeral is
not an activity most people are comfortable with, nor is it encouraged by the
industry. For generations, funeral providers have attempted to position themselves
physically and socially in the life of the local community, in such a way that locals
would not have to think twice about whom to call. Yet the Internet is changing
information-seeking activities, and the funeral industry, which is fully aware of the
risk of industry inertia, particularly in large urban centers, has developed a number of
Internet-based strategies for communicating with their potential customer base
before death.
Most commonly, cemeteries and funeral homes develop a Facebook presence to
build their brand and profile within social and community networks, while avoiding
overt references to death. In Australia, for example, the Tobin Brothers’media
manager maintains a very active Twitter feed, mostly tweeting and retweeting com-
ments about sporting events, interleaved with occasional tweets on funeral insur-
ance, new cemeteries, personnel changes at Tobin Brothers, celebrity eulogies,
“wacky”funerals, and other industry-related matters. Mount Sinai Memorial Park
in California is a very large Jewish cemetery which maintains an active social media
presence built around content related to Jewish heritage and religious and cultural
traditions. Larger funeral companies such as Tobin Brothers and Mount Sinai com-
monly employ in-house media managers tasked with using social media to integrate
the business in their self-defined community, while many of the smaller to mid-range
companies outsource media management to social media marketing companies,
such as DISRUPT media, which specialize in servicing the funeral industry.
These social media strategies aim to position the business in the everyday con-
sciousness of a community that sees itself as suffering from weakened intergenera-
tional commitments, and to use online media to harness a community and to
integrate with potential customers. Typical media strategies to build a social network
around the business involve detailed analytics, especially through Facebook’s
Nansen et al./SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY 79
Insights analytics dashboard, which measures affective engagement through statistics
such as clicks, Likes, Comments, Shares, post popularity, as well as some basic
demographic, and timing information about page visitors.
In addition to an online social media presence Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is
also promoted by social media services. SEO services aim to optimize Webpages so that
searches for cemeteries, funerals, or cremation come across the “right”Web sites at the
top of the search-return list. For example, funeralOne advertises, “Our SEO experts have
made the f1Connect Website platform to please both your client families and the search
engines. Your firm will rank high when families search for funeral homes in your area,
every time. Guaranteed”(“Transform Your Business,”2016).
The kind of sophisticated use of social media described above is of course not
universal within the industry sector. Many small funeral directors and homes, parti-
cularly in rural settings in the United States, Australia, and the UK, still see them-
selves as very much embedded in their town or village, and see little use for
computers, let alone social media.
Yet, the participatory qualities of the Internet offer opportunities for new enter-
prises outside the industry to intervene, despite resistance from those the innovators
refer to as “the traditionalists.”For example, at the 2014 Australian Funeral Expo, a
company called Funeral Studios offered software developed in part to circumvent the
aforementioned resistance to shopping around for a funeral. The system partially
automates the decision-making process and steps the bereaved through all the
decision-making and purchasing steps that need to be made to personally arrange
a funeral, without the presence of a funeral director. In a nearby booth a competitor
presented a “recommender system”Web site, modeled on hotel or airline booking
aggregators. Using this site, a visitor can “click to select”a location, date, mode of
disposal, coffin, hearse, celebrant, and so on, and the system recommends a funeral
director or home to deliver the package at the best price. Given its potential to
disintermediate the funeral directors’traditional advisory role, it is not surprising that
this product has at time of writing not received cooperation from the industry.
Thus, while many services aim to work with or complement the funeral industry,
others are less deferential and offer digital media as an alternative to “traditional”
commemoration methods. A clear example is the “end of life planning tool,”
DeadSocial, which aims to provide DIY resources for planning, organizing, and
commemorating a death:
The way in which we plan for death, grieve and remember has changed forever.
DeadSocial provides free tools, tutorials, and events to help the general public
understand and address death in today’s ever changing world. (“About
DeadSocial,”2015)
This Web site confronts the role of funeral directors and homes by providing
online resources and information to assist people managing death, grief, and com-
memoration by providing relevant and free advice, resources, tools, and tutorials.
Some of these are focused on digital affairs, assets and inheritance, including: a
80 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/March 2017
“goodbye & legacy builder tool”to send posthumous social media goodbye mes-
sages; guides to preparing different social media accounts for death through platform
policies about data deletion, downloading, or bequeathing; a digital legacy checklist;
and a social media will-writing guide.
In addition to Internet-related death planning, the site also includes a range of
resources and tutorials for planning for death, funerals, and legacies more generally.
The site offers advice and guidance about aspects of legacy planning such as
arranging your own funeral, creating a bucket list, organ donation, and creating an
ethical will. These resources also include the use of digital technologies at funeral or
memorial services; instructions on “how to create a memorial video from photos
using PowerPoint,”“Using iTunes playlists to decide what songs should be played at
a funeral,”and “sending funeral invitations by email.”Another offers the “tagging of
physical photos,”which translates social media features and norms of tagging
(assigning people’s names to photos in which they appear for purposes of search
and organization) into the contexts of physical photos and albums. The advice
offered by the site centers on people writing names or descriptions of photo content
onto the back of any photo to ensure social and family histories are remembered—a
practice that surely predates the Internet, yet is interestingly reconfigured in this DIY
context through the vernacular norms of social media.
DeadSocial draws on a DIY ethic rooted in digital culture’s history of open-source
and peer-production (e.g., Benkler, 2006) in order to enable planning and managing
death in terms of minimizing costs, circumventing the gate-keeper function of the
funeral director, and empowering users to customize and control their own experi-
ence. The potential of such services points to a future in which the funeral director
may be removed from their privileged position as “cultural intermediary”(Maguire &
Matthews, 2012). This shift is undergirded by an ethos associated with Internet use as
shared experience that invites increasing vernacular and individualized expressions
of emotion.
Industry Adoption of New Technologies
What the bereaved determine they need or want for disposal, interment, and
commemoration is significantly led and constrained by the choices offered by the
funeral industry; choices the funeral provider arrives at through a complex mix of
commercial, legal, and sociocultural considerations. To a lesser extent, the
bereaved’s choices may be affected through direct advertisement, news features,
and online searches.
The diversity and competition among innovative products in the funeral industry is
variously embraced and resisted by forces of tradition, innovation, regulation, and
commercial interest. Change is often associated with uncertainty, and differences of
opinion surround the use of screens in making funeral arrangements in the
U.S. funeral industry, where some worry about their potential for depersonalizing
the process and undermining the gravitas around death. Several vendors displaying
Nansen et al./SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY 81
funeral management software at the U.S. trade shows claimed that “arrangement
management”software ought only to be used “back of house”never “front of house”
alongside the bereaved as decisions were made. Others, however, suggested the
exact opposite: screens are here to stay, are the way of the future, and are indis-
pensable tools. One advocate is Brad Rex, who owns many cemeteries and funeral
homes in the United States and who presented the keynote at ICCFA 2015 entitled
“The Funeral Experience of the Future…. Today!”Brad uses large wall-mounted
screens to take clients through various packages and personalization options using
visual images. His staff also travels with mobile media using a tablet screen to
conduct funeral arranging in the homes of clients.
In Australia, the United States, and the UK many people opt for a biographical
multimedia show at commemorative ceremonies. In Australia these shows tend to
combine photo stills and a music soundtrack on a PowerPoint loop, and these are
usually put together by family members and modestly displayed on a temporary pull-
down screen. Other such shows, particularly in the United States, can be more
elaborate professional productions displayed in high-definition using professional
cinema projection systems. Multimedia presentations may help to evoke a rich
lived life in commemorative proceedings. For others, however, the emotive deploy-
ment of multimedia shifts the character of the funeral away from the communicative
efforts of living speakers, and towards the media spectacle, hollowing out the
emotion and meaning associated with coming together for this shared ritual.
Live Web casting is also increasingly offered as a service by some funeral homes
for the benefit of friends or family distributed around the world. Again, such funeral
mediation is received with ambivalence, with some funeral homes receptive to the
inclusive possibilities these technologies offer for bereaved family and friends and
unable to attend in person, while others express concern about the potential for such
broadcasting to detract from the event, reducing live memorials to the equivalent of
televisual representations of grief and mourning. Such mediated services and Internet
connected funeral attendance are, however, not always initiated by funeral directors
and homes, nor are they purely driven by commercial service provision. As dis-
cussed above, users of social media have over time brought their own platform-
specific vernacular practices to funerals and memorial services.
In an era of mobile media and smartphones, which feature networked cameras
and image-sharing software platforms like Instagram and Snapchat (Tifentale &
Manovich, 2015), vernacular practices of recording and mediating funerals are
increasingly visible (Gibbs et al., 2015). For example, the ways people share photo-
graphs on the photo-sharing platform Instagram, which are made visible to networks
through the “#funeral”tag, shows that there is a clear tension between the casual and
affective photo-sharing conventions of social media and the social expectations
about how one should behave at a ritual focusing on grieving for the deceased
(Gibbs et al., 2015; Meese, Nansen, Arnold, Gibbs, 2015). Many of these images
conform to vernacular conventions of self-presentation found in social media use,
emphasizing for example, the happy appearance of the user. Yet photographs are
often captioned with comments about trying to maintain composure, often for the
82 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/March 2017
benefit of others, which suggests an awareness of the tension between different
affective registers expected in these different social contexts, as well as efforts to
manage such emotional expectations.
The act of sharing photographs associated with funerals through Instagram is about
a form of affective communication to absent others (van Dijck, 2008). This verna-
cular practice is communicative “presencing”that co-locates the “person”at the
funeral within the social network and the social network at the funeral (Gibbs et al.
2015). Images shared around the hashtag funeral are about reaching out to signify
presence and to communicate an important and emotionally significant event to a
wider social network. It is to be expected that such visual and affective communica-
tion practices will be extended through the adoption and use of live-streaming
applications, such as Periscope or Facebook Live, to broadcast funeral or memorial
services to a social network as part of a vernacular practice that operates alongside or
even to circumvent commercial funeral streaming services.
The controversies that circulate around selfies at funerals indicate that such funeral
social media use is not yet widespread or accepted as part of more established norms
or rituals of commemoration. Yet they represent an informal and personalized use of
social media platforms within memorializing contexts and a response to difficulties
with physically attending a funeral. To affirm a connection with the deceased, to
express affinity with the bereaved, and to fulfil social obligations requires attendance
at a funeral, but sometimes the cost and time of long distance travel make it hard for
some of the bereaved to be there. A radical way to manage the problem has been
introduced by Orbis Robotics, which manufactures telepresence robots for mobile
video conferencing across a range of contexts and sectors, including one specifically
designed for funeral attendance. The robot not only allows people at a distance to
witness the funeral, but also enables a form of interactive real-time funeral presence
and participation.
The robot, named “CARL,”which was displayed at the 2015 ICCFA trade show,
has an electric motor enabling it to be mobile, a flat screen that is equipped with
camera, microphone and speaker and sits on top of an extendable “neck”(which can
be raised or lowered to talk to a person who is standing or sitting), and through Skype
software, enables a remote user to see and be seen, and to speak and to hear.
Someone sitting at a computer at a different location operates the robot remotely,
and so the robot offers opportunities for interactive attendance not afforded by
streaming or recorded.
Andrew Philips, a Funeral Director at Farnstrom Mortuary shared a story of how
effective and affective this form of participation is:
The most meaningful use of CARL that I have experienced was the time it
allowed me to offer a grieving sister the opportunity to remotely attend a private
viewing for her brother. She had been considering a last-minute 1,500 mile
flight in order to spend a few minutes with him, but cost and logistics were
prohibitive, and she was facing not being able to say goodbye. Through CARL,
we were able to give her the opportunity to attend the viewing remotely and
Nansen et al./SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY 83
spend some time with him. Her tears, words of love spoken to her brother and
gratitude toward our funeral home were evidence enough for me that we were
able to give her the tools she needed in order to walk through her loss…
At the time of writing, however, few funeral homes offer the Orbis Robot service,
perhaps wary of the cost or the disruption or distraction that might ensue from the
presence of the robot. The companies who are producing these and the directors
who buy or lease them see robots as a way to facilitate participation and a form of
co-presence in an important ritual, for a globally dispersed generation. Yet, how such
hardware driven technologies and funeral industry specific services play out in an
increasingly digitally dense environment characterized by “connected presence”
(Licoppe, 2004, p. 135–6) with distributed others, and expectations that everyone
is “always on”(boyd, 2012, p. 71) and available for online interaction through more
general purpose mobile social media networks, remains to be seen. CARL did not
attend the 2016 ICCFA.
Adapting Social Media for Memorialization
At trade shows many memorialization technologies were on display. Applications
of technological innovation and augmentation could be found in a range of artifacts,
including a range of Web-page memorials. While some memorial Web sites are
promoted directly to users online, at the trade shows these services were generally
part of enterprise (business-to-business) services directed at funeral homes or direc-
tors. The online memorials were often packaged for incorporation into funeral home
Web sites to leverage the existence of the “long tail”that extends from the peak
period of death by facilitating branding and driving online traffic. Interestingly, many
of these services are promoted as remaining in perpetuity or never expiring; dubious
claims in a digital environment where platforms and technologies can rapidly
become obsolete or disappear. Nevertheless, it is the idea of a tribute’s permanence
that makes it seductive and marketable.
Tributes.com is one of the more commercially successful sites and is used by
hundreds of U.S. cemeteries and funeral homes and hundreds of thousands of end-
users directly. Their Web memorials are an example of a paid commercial service
enabling:
unlimited text and photos; custom music; stunning full-screen backgrounds;
enhanced guestbook and social features to connect with family and friends;
custom video integration; Web links, and more (“Place a Memorial,”2016).
These types of memorialization products tap into desires to preserve a loved one’s
digital memory. These sites often import symbolic memorial materials from offline
spaces, such as obituaries, candles, flowers, and condolences, which are then re-
presented within an online space to emulate the affective sensation of a dedicated
84 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/March 2017
memorial which is “peaceful,”“dignified,”and “comforting.”In doing so, these
dedicated memorial sites position themselves as being more sensitive to the specific
contexts of death and memorialization than platforms like Facebook, which include
options for the deceased but are oriented to a broader living public. Yet, many of
these memorial platforms look and operate more like 1990’s Web homepages.
Aesthetically, their interfaces are often busy and loud, with information organized
spatially rather than temporally, spread over the page with banner advertising and
links creating a messy appearance. These sites are dynamic in the sense that users
are able to add content, especially text and photos, but these pages often don’t
incorporate social media functionality such as buttons that allow content to be
shared across platforms.
An alternative model for online remembrance is offered by Legacy.com. Rather
than constructing a memorial specifically for Web publication, Legacy.com
“scrapes”and repurposes obituaries from more than 1,500 collaborating newspapers
for their Web site, thus bypassing cemeteries and funeral homes. For this reason, the
company’s acquisition of Tributes.com in May 2015 was an industry controversy
(Thogmartin, 2015).
There are examples of more “social memorial websites”which borrow from the
affordances, features, and functionality of social media sites, such as funeralOne’s
“f1Connect”Web site platform and HeavenAddress’s“online memorial community.”
FuneralOne, for example, draws heavily on the aesthetics and platform vernacular of
Facebook in their memorial pages, with posts organized in a reverse chronological
timeline on a “Tribute Wall”which is easily scrolled through, and sharing buttons or
plug-ins are attached to the site for sharing memorial pages across other social media
platforms. By explicitly borrowing from and connecting to Facebook, such features
can be seen as an attempt to make such sites more familiar, user-friendly, and
accessible for a wider demographic of users. FuneralOne’s memorials are, however,
disaggregated as part of their funeral platform package, which locates them within a
specific funeral home URL and branded page.
In contrast, HeavenAddress extends the affects, aesthetics, and logics of commercial
social media platforms in subtler and diverse ways. HeavenAddress, Australasia’s
largest Web memorial site, with over 1.5 million pages of memorials, is available
through Web access and mobile applications on Android or iOS, so that as they
advertise you can “Keep your loved ones by your side”(“HeavenAddress,”2016).
By archiving and accessing a memorial on a mobile app the deceased is taken out of a
specific geographic place of sequestration and situated within an embodied and
proximate relation and living social network. Such online memorials are evolving
concurrently with informal, relatively temporary vernacular memorials such as those
that appear on roadsides, and practices in which a traditional place of rest is replaced
by scattering the person’s remains at sites of personal significance and meaning (Clark,
2007;Doss,2008). Similarly, by archiving and accessing a memorial on a mobile app,
the deceased is taken out of a specific geographic place of sequestration and situated
within an embodied and proximate relation and living social network.
Nansen et al./SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY 85
HeavenAddress memorials also include features such as a “memory cloud”gen-
erated from aggregated user posts, sharing buttons in order to connect the separate
memorial site to social networks, and “miss u”and “love u”buttons, which visitors
can click on to express their feelings. The founder of HeavenAddress argued in an
interview that these features offer convivial affordances for a generation that is more
comfortable with spontaneous “clickable”expressions of emotion and empathy,
rather than the more labored forms of expression evident in more traditional com-
memorative composition of text. In this view the site is not trivializing condolences
(cf. Harnett, 2016) but is providing a culturally and technically attuned means to
enable expressions of grief, emotions borrowed from vernacular forms of affective
engagement learned through social media.
These buttons resonate with the affective regime of social networking interfaces
that Gerlitz and Helmond (2013) dub “the Like economy.”Facebook’s worldwide
release of the “reactions”feature in February 2016 offers an expanded repertoire of
emotional engagement (featuring emotions such as “laughing,”“sad,”or “angry”),
while nevertheless aggregating and bracketing the kinds of responses that are possi-
ble, proper, and profitable (Krug, 2016).
Finally, HeavenAddress also borrows from the commercial functionality of social
media. Unlike funeralOne, which positions memorials within dedicated funeral
home URLs, HeavenAddress aggregates all memorial pages within their Web
address. The pages are co-branded and linked with the relevant memorial funeral
director, but they are all hosted within the HeavenAddress URL with the aim of
leveraging Google’s’PageRank algorithm. This aggregation increases the scale of
traffic to HeavenAddress’Web site, and by association to the page ranking of linked
funeral director Web sites. This operation mimics, admittedly on a much smaller
scale, the network effects of large commercial social media platforms. By leveraging
this algorithmic operation in terms of organizing the relationships between
HeavenAddress and funeral Web site linking, this optimizes the search ranking and
prominence of related funeral directors within local Web searches as part of the link
economy (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013).
These various features and operations can be understood as a form of “platform
politics”in which companies such as Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, or Facebook com-
pete to position themselves as the primary locus of digital activity (Gillespie, 2010,
p. 348–352). In this context HeavenAddress discursively positions itself to different
constituencies of users, both mourners and commercial funeral service providers, by
repurposing the look and feel of social media within the contexts of grief and
memorialization.
Conclusion
This article has discussed how innovations in the funeral industry are borrowing
from the culture, technology and commerce of social media. Based on ethnographic
research at funeral industry conventions, key informant interviews, and analysis of
86 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media/March 2017
trade publications and presentations we have found that the aesthetics, affects, and
operations of social media intersect with the funeral industry at different phases of the
death and commemoration process. The examples we have provided include online
planning tools, services to enable remote funeral attendance, and digital memorializa-
tion products. These examples were analyzed in terms of the ways (i) the ethic of
participatory digital culture was translated into planning death; (ii) the ways technol-
ogies for mediating presence were adopted at funeral services, and (iii) the ways
vernacular expressions of emotion familiar to users of social media interfaces were
adapted within various online spaces of memorialization. In turn, we have found that
these services have been variously contested, adopted, or adapted within the funeral
industry depending upon the perceived value they offer funeral directors in maintain-
ing their service role in balancing care and commerce. These technologies borrow
from the social practices, affective registers, and cultural conventions of social media.
Adopting these can be understood as part of the funeral industry’s efforts to shore up its
historically intermediary role, social status, and economic relevance in the face of
potential “disruption”from technological innovation and shifting norms of networked
grieving and commemoration in digital culture.
Funding
This research was supported by funding from Australian Research Council
Discovery Project (DP140101871).
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